• “How and Why Did Genocide Become a Non-Political Crime” by A. Dirk Moses (Professor of Global and Colonial History (19th-20th centuries), EUI)
Tuesday, September 23rd
4:00PM to 6:00PM, 411 Fayerweather

International law distinguishes between political and the non-political crimes in the following way: racial hatred is defined as non-political because victims are attacked for who they are: for their identity. Genocide cannot occur where a victim group has agency, as in, say, launching an insurgency, because such action implies politics. This conception of genocide as a non-political, mass hate crime is modeled on the Holocaust of European Jewry, meaning that Holocaust memory intersects in important ways with the humanitarian intervention agenda. To galvanize the “will to intervene,” human rights activists must make contemporary civil wars resemble the Holocaust by casting civilians as victims of murderous racial persecution: for who they are rather than for what some of them may have done. The spurious distinction between racial and political intentions—the depolicitization of the genocide concept—lies at the heart of the relatively new field of genocide studies and its older sibling, Holocaust studies. One consequence is the promotion of toleration as genocide’s antidote. Another is that genocides are misrecognized, as in the case of the UN Darfur report in 2005. In this paper, I explain how and why this distinction was constructed by revisiting the contingent origins of the genocide concept. My discussion mainly concerns two moments in the second half of the 1940s when it was crystallized in international law and the postwar imagination: 1) the latter Nuremberg Trials; and 2) the concurrent UN Debates about the Genocide Convention.

As part of the 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition seminar series, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights presents

Human Rights on the World Stage

A Talk by Sharon Sliwinski, Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario

With Commentary by Rosalyn Deutsche, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Barnard College

Date and time: Monday 9 December 2013 at 6.15pm

Location: 602 Hamilton, Columbia University

The 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition operated both as cultural document and as educational implement. Sharon Sliwinski proposes to highlight some of the tensions involved in transposing human rights into these terms. What will be under particular scrutiny are the fantasies that drive such educational campaigns, namely, that proper knowledge will bring about social progress. Professor Sliwinski will address the historical lineage of this fantasy, as well as its persistence in the present in form of “sites of conscience.”

This is the third event in a seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will lead up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014. For more information, visit www.exhibithumanrights.org.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

Location: Second Floor Common Room, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University (see directions here)

In a conversation with Thomas Keenan we will explore the historical and contemporary visual culture of human rights by drawing comparisons between UNESCO’s Human Rights exhibition from 1949 and the Family of Man exhibition from 1955. Questions will be raised about the role of images in giving meaning to the idea of human rights, be they linked to triumphant narratives, depictions of suffering, or acting as evidence.

This is the second event in a seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will lead up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014. For more information, visit www.exhibithumanrights.org.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

The event is free and open to the public with limited seating offered.

With Unesco’s 1949 Human Rights Exhibition as its point of departure, this talk will consider the historical moment of the so-called “human rights revolution” in the late 1940s. Dr. Duranti’s analysis of the forces that first championed human rights invites a reflection on how far this moment should be considered revolutionary in the first place. Instead, Dr. Duranti suggests that the human rights became a means of rearticulating discredited political agendas in postwar Europe, and thus the moment in question may have constituted as much a restoration as a revolution.

This is the opening lecture in a new seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 Unesco Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will seek to explore the exhibition’s themes through the research of human rights scholars from various disciplines in an open and interactive setting, leading up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia University’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014.

Dr. Marco Duranti received his PhD from Yale University in 2009 and now teaches history at the University of Sydney. He is currently writing a book on the genesis of European human rights law for Oxford University Press.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

The event is free and open to the public with limited seating offered. Find directions here.